Sunday, February 26, 2012

My cunning plan to use a free trial to test my desire to return to EVE before wasting a subscription may be backfiring. I spent over five hours in the game yesterday playing with my fledgling Gallente pilot "Jax Custard" and I am getting fond of the guy despite his silly, designed to be thrown in the bin name.

It certainly proves my assertion from yesterday that everything I love about EVE is immediately accessible to a brand new character. The new career tutorials are a great addition and I enjoyed working through them. I even tried mining for the first time in my EVE life and enjoyed it (for about five minutes). There is something gratifying about listening to the sound of your mining beams cutting into solid asteroid rock and automagically filling your hold with treasure (for about five minutes).

The career tutorials were fun and got me to try out stuff I would otherwise have ignored but eventually I felt a hankering to do some level 1 combat missions which is a route I have taken before. This time around I have the benefit of experience so I can hopefully avoid wasting time courting the favour of dead end agents and factions. I also find myself relative affluent in terms of ships and isk thanks to the tutorial missions. I have a Catalyst destroyer, Iteron hauler and multiple frigates already in my hangar. The only thing I am missing is the skills to fly them but even that has gotten easier thanks to the introduction of "certificates" which suggest useful packages of skills to train.

Despite the hand holding I couldn't pass up the opportunity for for some fun time with Eve-mon (skill training) and Eve Fitting Tool (ship loadout planning). I put together a simple mission running fit for the Tristan that works with less than a days worth of skill training. Nothing fancy, it uses the time honoured PVE principle of running away from any enemies while chucking bullets and missiles back at them from long range weaponry.

The Tristan is the top Gallente tier 1 Frigate,equivalent to the Minmatar Rifter but I fond it surprisingly difficult to fill all four weapons slots within the tight CPU and Power limits. The micro auxilliary power core gives a boost to power but costs almost as much as the ship itself. Without it I could not fit a second missile launcher.

First mission from my chosen level 1 agent was the infamous "Worlds Collide" which was a good test for my new Tristan. You are sent into the middle of a war zone with a ridiculous amount of enemies. It is possible to speed run to the pick up objective without killing anything but with careful aggro management my Tristan was able to clear all of the enemies.